"Yes," replied Mr. Griggs, with a solemnity which struck the new assistant as absurdly pathetic. "Hens," he explained further; "my best one is down with croup or somethink o' the kind. Your father has taken a many prizes with his birds, and I thought you might know all about 'em. I've never had great success with 'em myself. Come outside and tell me what you think." Without waiting for a reply, the bookseller shuffled through the passage into a back-yard, and the youth followed as one in a dream. The yard was almost entirely devoted to poultry, and if Mr. Griggs was an amateur at the pursuit, he had at least prepared for it in no mean way, three sides of the place being taken up with wired hen-runs and a wooden house for his stock. In a compartment by itself, gasping and choking, lay the object of the old man's solicitude. "The finest layer I ever had," he declared despondingly. "An egg a day as reg'lar as clockwork. I'd rather lose two of the others." His sorrow deepened when Henry said that he had never seen a hen in that state before, and did not know what was wrong with it. "Then I'll be forced to ask old John Shakespeare, the grocer, what to do; although I 'ate the man, and don't want to be beholden to him for anythink. But he's our champion breeder, and what must be, must be." Shakespeare, grocer, hens! Henry doubted seriously if his ears were doing their duty, but there was no mistaking the anxiety of Mr. Ephraim Griggs. He could not have been more perturbed if his wife had been dangerously ill. His wife? That reminded Henry that he had heard his father say Mrs. Griggs had been dead these many years. Perhaps that was why the bookseller was so untidy. "You had better go back to the shop, my lad," said he, in a voice which meant he was now resigned to the worst, "and take a look round. I'll be in there directly." When Henry returned to the shop he found that Mr. Pemble, the senior assistant, had arrived; but for the moment that young gentleman was so engrossed with the study of his features in a broken looking-glass that he did not notice Henry's entrance. Mr. Pemble's anxiety seemed to be centred around the tardy growth of an incipient moustache, which, when an illuminating ray of sunshine fell upon his upper lip, was readily visible to the naked eye. A somewhat prim and characterless person, with more teeth than his mouth seemed able to accommodate, Mr. Pemble was the _bete noir_ of Jenks, the dog-loving shop-boy, who, with a sly wink to Henry and an expressive grimace, indicated unmistakably his opinion of the senior assistant. This was a sign to the new-comer that if he cared to make common cause against Mr. Pemble, Jenks was with him to the death; but Henry, either in his rustic simplicity or his lofty indifference to the youngster, did not respond, and waited for Mr. Pemble to languidly acknowledge his presence. "Ah, you're the new assistant Mr. Griggs was speaking of," he said at length.